9Blu’s Comments

One way to address this would be to borrow some simple tech from private dash cams which have crash detection. If the officer turns the camera "off", have it not turn off but instead remain on but not writing to storage, just buffering the last x minutes to RAM or other volatile storage. If the device detects certain activity like a physical altercation (via a accelerometer) or close gunshot (microphone) it writes out the buffer and automatically begins recording. That way the officer can go "off the record" yet if something extraordinary happens it would be captured.

Bringing in the state police was absolutely the right thing to do. The state police showed up as cops, not some paramilitary organization like the county police tried to be. They showed up to keep the peace while not interfering with or antagonizing the protesters. It went from armored police vehicles with snipers (!) looking down their scopes at the crowd, police shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at the protesters, and harassing and even trying to suppress the press reporting on the situation to police in regular uniforms not interfering with the protests, just being there to make sure that no violence broke out. And guess what: it didn't.

I'm holding off judgement on what happened since we don't have all the facts yet (thanks to the local PD being idiots and not releasing them right away). However to say that the local and county cops mishandled the aftermath would be a huge understatement. The local police chief needs to be fired. If for nothing else that the fact that his department has dash-cams but never had them installed. Dash and/or bodycam recording of this incident would have made it much clearer what actually happened here. They local PD should have also been more forthcoming up front with all of the information on the situation that first day. Instead they only told a fragment of what happened, which made zero sense (some kid randomly assaults a cop, wtf?). Then they let everything fester for almost a week, and I feel that hey are still withholding important facts about the case from the community even after today's revelations. They failed to keep order during the first night of demonstrations when some people took advantage of the protests to turn violent. Then they brought in the county cops who turned militaristic against the peaceful demonstrators and the press the following nights, antagonizing the community and creating more violence and tension in the process. In addition, due to the way this was handled, even if (big if, but still) the cop turns out to be in the right in all this, by trying to "protect" him and the rest of his department, the police chief has instead totally fucked him.

The whole situation is the very definition of a world-class cluster-fuck.

"ABC, Disney, and CBS, have lost what ever potential they may have had that appealed to watching through this method."

Yea, they don't care about anyone who wants to watch their shows commercial free. If you don't watch the ads, then they don't get revenue from your viewership. The current rating they use to calculate ad rates is called C3, or commercial three. It's viewing, with commercials, for three days starting with the live airing. It specifically attempts to measure only those who did not skip the commercials.

There is a big misconception about TV that most people have: They think that THEY, the viewers, are the customers. They aren't. They're the product. Advertisers (the customer) pay the networks (the suppliers) for viewers (product). The networks use TV shows (the bait) to attract those viewers (again, the product).

You are to a TV network what a halibut is to a fisherman.

That said, Les is crazy if he thinks he will get advertisers to agree to a Live+7 rating. Considering the fight they had to get them to agree to C3.

Yes they have, and we expect it. It's part of the game. However, the stuff we are hearing about today is the same kind of stuff we heard horror stories about from the Russia and East Germany decades ago. It's one thing to spy on other nations, it's quite another to spy on your own citizens en massse and to the startling degree that we (US and UK) are today. Did we really win the cold war to turn into our enemy?

"No Real Changes Will Happen With NSA Surveillance Until Clapper And Alexander Are Fired"

No, no real changes will happen with NSA surveillance until the majority of the general public starts to give a damn about it. The most shocking thing to come out of this entire affair (for me at least) is that most people in this country seem perfectly OK with what's going on. Honestly, I find that far more frightening than anything the government is doing at the moment.

The real reason most of this was kept so tightly guarded wasn't to prevent tipping off the bad guys (the smart ones already figured we were doing what it turns out we were doing, and the dumb ones will get caught no matter what they know). The reason was that they feared a public backlash. They didn't get one, not really. Sure a minority of us are up in arms about it, but most people either don't seem that upset, or actually support it! Which brings up the question: If they were afraid they wouldn't be able to get away with this but it turns out they can, WTF are they going to do next?

And this is why the movie is struggling domestically. Somehow they absolutely failed at marketing the movie. About a week before it came out the studio was freaking out because the movie's Q score was way lower than it should have been for a big tent pole movie like this. The movie wasn't on the general public's radar. I'd love to know how many millions of dollars they burned on the marketing budget.

Good news (for the studio) is that it's making money overseas and hasn't even opened in China or Japan yet.

Not NSA Documents, not classified, and not related to PRISM. As someone already pointed out, they are available on the DoD's own website. If you want to know about the network in these documents, talk to Bradly Manning. It's how he got access to most of the materials he leaked.

Actually it's about distribution deals. Many US shows are not produced by the network that airs them, so the producing studio sells the rights to different networks in different countries and it all turns into a big mess.

And this is a very important distinction. It's the difference between being treated as a POW or shipped off to Gitmo (or worse) if you are captured. Yes it's weird but the rules were never written with anything like this in mind.